Mala writes, "Have you registered for Oracle OpenWorld 2014? If not, it's certainly not too late, but you should take advantage of registration discounts. Oracle's early bird pricing for the conference continues till July 18, 2014. A full conference pass is $2,150 vs buying an all conference pass on site is $2,650. OpenWorld is a great opportunity to learn about the latest technology and network with other peers and attend sessions, Hands on Labs and General Sessions from Oracle executives. See you the big show that's just around the corner..."

Oracle Corporation (NYSE: ORCL) announced the pricing of its sale of $1.0
billion of Floating Rate Notes due 2017 (the '2017 Floating Rate Notes'
$750 million of Floating Rate Notes due 2019 (the '2019 Floating Rate
Notes' $2.0 billion of 2.25% Notes due 2019 (the '2019 Fixed Rate
Notes' $1.5 billion of 2.80% Notes due 2021 (the '2021 Fixed Rate
Notes' $2.0 billion of 3.40% Notes due 2024 (the '2024 Fixed Rate
Notes' $1.75 billion of 4.30% Notes due 2034 (the '2034 Fixed Rate
Notes' and $1.0 billion of 4.50% Notes due 2044 (the '2044 Fixed Rate
Notes' The offering is expected to settle on July 8, 2014, subject to
customary closing conditions.

Oracle intends to use the net proceeds from the offering for general
corporate purposes, which may include stock repurchases, payment of cash
dividends on its common stock, future acquisitions, including its pending
acquisition of MICROS Systems, Inc., and repayment of indebtedness,
including repayment of the 3.75% senior notes due July 2014 ($1.50
billion principal amount outstanding).

Corneliu writes, "With the advent of modern approaches such as
virtualization, management layer integration and cloud computing,
the data center landscape is evolving at an accelerated pace. While
traditional limitations are being addressed through novel approaches,
new issues are inherently being introduced that compound the issue, even
as business and IT customer expectations have become more sophisticated
than ever before. Oracle's response to these challenges is the Oracle
Application Engineered Systems (AES) portfolio, which includes the
purpose-built engineered systems (e.g.Exa* product family) and general
purpose (e.g.SPARC SuperCluster).

When we talk about how the Oracle hardware and software stacks are
engineered to work together, we are referring to our unique ability to
offer customers a completely integrated hardware and software stack..."

Cinzia Mascanzoni writes, "Watch this replay and learn why the Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance is different from other converged infrastructure solutions on the market. Learn how to create a private cloud with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c on the Virtual Compute Appliance, and hear testimonials from a partners and customers. Speakers include: Mark Hurd, Wim Coekaerts and Scott Genereux..."

"The majority of organizations continue to use expensive primary storage systems to store infrequently accessed data, with respondents engaging in this practice spending significantly more of their annual IT budget on storage than their peers, according to a report from TwinStrata.

Survey results indicated organizations that use public cloud storage to store inactive data have a comparatively lower storage budget than those that do not, with 62 percent of organizations that store inactive data solely on storage area networks (SANs) or network attached storage (NAS) spending more than 10 percent of their IT budget on storage..."

Those are brawny, manly numbers that red-blooded Americans can relate
to. Not fussy little decimals, sliding further into irrelevancy with
each succeeding digit.

We're even less fond of ratios. A 600HP car. What's the power to weight
ratio? Yet, if pushed, we'll go with ratios. PUE of 1.1- but we won't get
excited about them. But our love of round numbers can lead us astray. Why
is 1,000,000 IOPS the goto number for all-flash arrays?..."

"Businesses struggle mightily with the deluge of data flooding their systems, and they are trying to figure out how to put it to active use. Adding to the challenge is the presence of inactive data, an increasing burden, which requires mixed-media solutions such as cloud storage, storage-area networks (SANs) or network-attached storage (NAS) devices. Most organizations continue to use expensive primary storage systems for infrequently accessed data, according to a study from cloud storage provider TwinStrata. Organizations engaging in this practice spend significantly more of their annual IT budget on storage than their peers..."

"TwinStrata, Inc., in cloud-integrated storage solutions, announced the results of its Industry Trends: 2014 State of Storage survey.

Analysis reveals that the majority of organizations continue to use expensive primary storage systems to store infrequently accessed data. As a result, respondents engaging in this practice spend more of their annual IT budget on storage than their peers.
Conducted in May 2014, the survey collected responses from 254 IT professionals involved in their organization's storage strategy..."

"What is the Internet of Things (IoT), exactly? If you're a consumer, then the first thing that leaps to mind might be a Nest Wi-Fi thermostat, or perhaps those smart health bands that let you monitor your activity level from an app on your smartphone.

That's part of it. But if you're an engineer, you might think of the smart sensors that General Electric embeds in locomotives and wind turbines, while a city manager might be considering smart parking meters, and a hospital administrator might envision swallowable smart pill sensors that monitor how much medication you've taken or blood pressure cuffs and blood glucose monitors that can monitor patient health in the field and wirelessly stream updates into clinical systems..."

"Nearly ten years ago, U.S. broadcasters, by order of the government,
helped usher in the new era of high-definition television. Will the
next big upgrade be driven not by the government, but by the high-end
smartphones that you may already own?

So-called 'Ultra High Definition' or 4K TV sets have barely hit store
shelves in the U.S. But that has not stopped mobile phone makers Samsung,
LG and Sony from hawking high-end devices since late last year with the
capability to shoot videos in 4K, which boasts four times the resolution
of conventional HD video.

This could very well turn out to be the first living room revolution
launched from your pocket..."

"Smartphones and tablets will be able to transmit 4K video directly to big screens next year now that mobile chip maker Qualcomm has acquired Wilocity.

Wilocity makes chips based on WiGig technology, which wirelessly transfers data between devices at speeds of up to 7Gbps (bits per second) over a limited distance.

Qualcomm will integrate that technology in its 64-bit Snapdragon 810 mobile chip, it said Wednesday when it announced the acquisition. The first smartphones and tablets with WiGig will ship in the second half of next year, said Cormac Conroy, vice president of product management and engineering for Qualcomm's Atheros division..."

"When Google spent $400 million earlier this year acquiring DeepMind, a
London-based artificial intelligence company, the purchase garnered a lot
of attention. But to researchers in the AI field, it was no surprise. The
field of AI isn't a new one, but it's now become so hot that tech giants
like Google and Facebook have been snapping up not only companies but
also students and other experts trained and prepared to leverage the
technology for business.

There are three aspects about AI that could change the future of your
business..."

"Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced Switch-IB, the next generation of its IB switch IC optimized for HPC, Web 2.0, database and cloud data centers, and the first switch IC capable of 100Gb/s per port speeds.

Switch-IB is the fastest switch with 36-ports of 100Gb/s to provide 7.2Tb/s of switching capacity - 250% higher than the nearest alternative - with 130ns of latency and power consumption. Switch-IB is also the first to introduce router capabilities that enable isolation and scalability to meet needs of hundreds-of-thousand node clusters and beyond..."

"In a release from earlier today, rumors surrounding a new BitPay partner have now been confirmed. Newegg is now accepting Bitcoin. Like competitor TigerDirect, Newegg uses American Bitcoin payment processor BitPay to immediately settle Bitcoin payments into fiat, much in the same way that they accept other digital currencies of the more centralized flavor, such as PayPal and VISA..."

"Those who believe in bitcoin's capabilities are steadfast that the
digital currency will prevail as a new kind of financial institution.

Others, similarly passionate about their beliefs, argue that bitcoin is
a bubble, too volatile to amount to anything permanent in society.

For every hardworking developer, entrepreneur, investor, politician or
activist fighting to bolster the bitcoin ecosystem - of which there are
many - there is someone on the other side of the fence, working hard to
maintain the status quo.

No matter what side you're on, it's safe to say that this year has been
an eventful one for bitcoin.

Here are the eight biggest bitcoin heroes and villains of 2014 (so
far):.."

"The flower delivery company 1-800-FLOWERS will be accepting Bitcoin as
a payment option for their services starting this fall. 1-800-FLOWERS is
the world's leading florist and gift retailer. The move will not only
cover 1-800-FLOWERS.com, but will also integrate Bitcoin acceptance
throughout all of their family companies including FannieMay.com,
Cheryls.com, ThePopcornFactory.com, 1-800-Baskets.com, FruitBouquets.com,
and Stockyards.com..."

"With some research and a little technical aptitude, distributed forms of money such as bitcoin can be used as the digital equivalent of cash, offering the potential for anyone to theoretically bank themselves without relying on traditional financial institutions.

Additionally, innovative wallet technologies mean anyone can store vast amounts of value without the need to trust governments or banks. From brain wallets to paper wallets, multisig to BIP32 hierarchical deterministic technologies, the ability to store cryptocurrency value independent of a third party is becoming more sophisticated by the month..."

"Cryptocurrency had a lot of firsts in Vancouver, but nothing brought
more media attention than the world's first Bitcoin ATM. Installed by
the Bitcoiniacs (now CoinTrader) in partnership with Robocoin, it found
its home in a Waves Coffee House. Originally signed onto Bitcoin by
the Bitcoin Co-op, CoinTrader soon moved in and made it their Bitcoin
headquarters, which it still is, today!..."

Gab writes, "One of the most frequent questions in our forums is about how to get the graphical integration when using Visual Studio with MySQL databases.
When developing applications with MySQL databases there are two basics products: a .net driver for MySQL, which is MySQL Connector/Net, and a tool to integrate all of the Visual Studio database oriented tools such as the Server Explorer window. These tools are designed to make a lot easier the creation and edition of MySQL databases when using an IDE like Visual Studio.

The MySQL for Visual Studio product can be integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio versions 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2013. It can be used with any edition starting with Professional up to Ultimate . Also the MySQL Server versions that are fully supported are 5.1 to 5.6 and lately 5.7. Although 5.7 has a lot of performance improvements there are some new features that are not fully supported yet, so it should be used at your own discretion..."

Gab writes, "MySQL for Visual Studio is a product including all of the Visual Studio integration previously available as part of Connector/Net. The 1.2.1 version is a beta release of this product which is feature complete but still can contain minor bugs and is not suitable for production environments.

This version is appropriate for use with MySQL Server versions 5.5-5.6.
MySQL Server 5.7 is also compatible but not fully supported yet.

Javier writes, "The MySQL Windows Experience Team is proud to announce the release of MySQL for Excel version 1.3.1. This is a RC release for 1.3.x.

MySQL for Excel is an application plug-in enabling data analysts to very easily access and manipulate MySQL data within Microsoft Excel. It enables you to directly work with a MySQL database from within Microsoft Excel so you can easily do tasks such as:

Importing MySQL data into Excel

Exporting Excel data directly into MySQL to a new or existing table

Editing MySQL data directly within Excel

As this is a Release Candidate version the MySQL for Excel product can be downloaded only by using the product standalone installer at this link:

MySQL Workbench 6.1.7 is a periodic maintenance release including 17 bug fixes. Additionally, the supported Linux distribution list has been refreshed. Users of the product are recommended to upgrade to this version.

With over 30 new features, this version has many significant enhancements focusing on real-time performance assessment and analysis from the SQL statement level to server internals and file IO. You can see this from additions to the SQL Editor as well as new dashboard visualization and reporting that take advantage of MySQL Server 5.6 and 5.7 Performance Schema, and enhancements to the MySQL Explain Plans.

The simple fact is this: the emergence of cloud has fundamentally changed the role of the CIO; making job descriptions obsolete, altering organizational structures and changing the benchmarks of success.

How can CIOs effectively make the transition from "keepers of the technology" to "chief innovators?" How can a managed cloud solution help them regain control of this new, multi-sourced environment and all the business insight it brings?

Register to learn about:

What is the Cloud? What is the industry's definition?

How do I, as a CIO, take something that I have less and less control over and make it strategic?

How does the CIO leverage this transformation to gain a seat in the Executive Committee or the Board Room?

Chris Kanaracus writes in Computerworld, "Being second isn't good enough for Oracle when it comes to cloud revenue, co-president Mark Hurd told investment analysts this week following the company's fourth-quarter and year-end earnings report.

As part of its earnings announcement, Oracle trumpeted that at an annual cloud subscription revenue run rate of nearly $2 billion, it is now the industry's second-largest cloud vendor behind Salesforce.com..."

"The split between adoption of self-built and third-party-delivered private cloud has held steady at 30 percent and 70 percent, respectively, in 2013 and 2014.

The preference for third party delivered, or managed, private cloud will increase over the next two years as hybrid integration, increased complexity of clouds and security concerns challenge enterprise IT skills and capabilities, according to a report from Technology Business Research (TBR)..."

"Cloud services catalogs are a centralized resource to both discover and leverage private or public cloud services. An outgrowth of service registries and repositories from the days of SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture), this new and improved technology provides a single gateway for service access for applications and end users. Keep in mind that services are APIs, and APIs are services, in the world of cloud computing.

Services are, in essence, access points to core cloud services. These services include infrastructure services, such as storage and compute, or business applications services, such as gathering a credit rating. We leverage these services, cloud or not, public or private, to create business solutions that use more of an assembly rather than a development process..."

"CIOs are between a rock and a hard place with respect to the adoption -- make that uncontrolled, unsanctioned adoption -- of SaaS apps by their business users. Turn a blind eye to the use of cloud-based apps by the business and CIOs may be putting their enterprises at greater risk of a data breach -- three times greater risk, according to a recent study from the Ponemon Institute.

Clamping down on shadow apps, on the other hand, risks being labeled a "CI-no," a rubric no CIO can afford to court, even for the sake of information security...."

"The following is a transcript of a podcast on choosing cloud application integration solutions by Jeffrey M. Kaplan, managing director of the THINKstrategies cloud consulting firm. This transcript has been edited for clarity and editorial style.

Jan Stafford: Welcome to Choosing Cloud Application Integration Solutions, a podcast on SearchCloudApplications.com, a TechTarget site. Our speaker is ThinkStrategies' founder and managing director, Jeff Kaplan. Founded in 2001, ThinkStrategies is an independent strategic consulting firm, focused on software as a service, or SaaS, cloud computing, managed services and other innovative technology service solutions..."

"The U.S. economy has come through a long period of recession and then a sluggish recovery. But the recent news has been positive, with payroll processor ADP estimating the economy added 281,000 jobs in June, the fifth consecutive month of robust job growth. The IT industry slogged through the Great Recession along with the rest of the economy. But after years of tight corporate IT budgets, research firm Gartner is reporting that global IT spending will rise for the rest of 2014 and into 2015 as the rest of the economy expands and IT vendors introduce the latest products customers care about..."

""Never walk past a mistake" is one of the first lessons taught to young leaders in the U.S. military, according to retired U.S. General and Secretary of State Colin Powell in his memoir, It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership. Like a gifted teacher, Powell, with an able assist from coauthor Tony Koltz, reinforces the message of "Never walk past a mistake" by succinctly describing it a second way: "Make on-the-spot corrections."

Powell expounds on the advantages of "Never walk past a mistake" by describing its five purposes. They are, in his words:..."

"Your IT team is key to your business's success -- and it's up to you to hire and cultivate the best talent. Of course, that's easier said than done; assembling and nurturing a technology dream team involves more than just matching candidates' skills to your job requisites and assigning them roles, said James Kenigsberg, chief technology officer at the software company 2U..."

"The hotshot with great experience may look good, but [he or she] might not be the best fit with the rest of your employees," he said. "Culture is king when chasing tech greatness."

Part one of this SearchCIO feature on SaaS governance explored how CIOs can protect their companies against the risk of shadow apps while still reaping the benefits these cloud apps can bring the business. In part two, Gartner GRC expert French Caldwell gives pointers on developing SaaS governance. Also, read about the security tool that one IT director has found to be useful for curbing shadow apps and improving his IT strategy.

"The context here is about CIOs driving the necessary transformation. The question is also about creating disruption with innovative ideas and changing the statusquo.

Interestingly, CIOs seem to be all set to plunge into this disruptive journey. They seem to be taking the risk and appear confident enough to take up the impossible. While industry experts and business gurus have been talking for quite some time on the need for CIOs to be transformative, innovative, and to align with business, start accepting failures to drive transformation and such other aspects, CIOs themselves are now on a new path--that of driving change..."

"In addition to managing the IT agendas of their companies, CIOs must build a second agenda of Business Technology (systems, technology, and processes to win, serve, and retain customers). The IT agenda focuses internally on supply chains, financial systems, and administrative technology. These are all critical -- most corporations would stop in minutes without IT. But as empowered and digital customers demand more, BT will emerge to concentrate on technologies -- CRM, systems of engagement, customer apps, customer insight, digital customer service as examples -- that will enhance customer experience..."

"A new Unify study finds that highly successful virtual teams engage more often on a personal level, with team members speaking their minds and contributing openly regardless of their location. The report says team member location is not a significant factor for success, but conversing is. "Highly successful teams engage more often on a personal level; speak their minds and contribute freely regardless of their location; are more likely to be in meetings ripe with engaging dialogue, rather than a one-way monologue that may or may not be relevant to all team members," according to the report. Conducted earlier this year by Unify (formerly Seimens Enterprise Communications), the report's sample size was 326 executives in a variety of industries, with 43 percent of them working in technology..."

Join us for the next vBeers @ Broward. We meet on the 2nd Wednesday of each month in Broward County. The May meeting will be at the Funky Buddha Brewery, which is located in Oakland Park, just a few minutes from I-95.

This will be a non-sponsored event so bring your wallet, your sense of
humor and get ready for some great IT and virtualization conversations
with some of the best people in South Florida's IT community (including
YOU!).

"Forrester data indicates that improving business continuity and
disaster recovery (BC/DR) ranks at or near the top of Asia Pacific
companies' vendor and product selection criteria. However, the technology
infrastructure to support BC/DR is poorly architected, funded, and
managed. Many firms are now looking to potentially outsource their DR
infrastructure and leverage the public cloud's pay-per-use model via
vendors like Amazon Web Services.

Despite the low price points, high degree of automation, and robust
infrastructure, few companies are using public cloud as a DR site..."

"It's been said many times, but we'll say it again: Disaster is inevitable. In crafting disaster recovery plans, companies must consider environmental, computer and human-related threats -- each of which require different treatment post-disruption.

An IT disaster recovery test examines each step in a disaster recovery (DR) plan to ensure an organization can recover mission-critical data, restore business applications and continue normal operations after an interruption of services. In SearchCIO's June tweet jam, it quickly became apparent that while creating IT DR plans is essential, executing test runs of these plans to confirm they do their jobs is just as important, if not more so..."

"First lady Michelle Obama and her two daughters were televised wearing J. Crew's designs as President Barack Obama was sworn into office in 2009. A day later, the store's website crashed.

Of course, companies can prevent a website crash by increasing capacity when they anticipate a flood of traffic -- but predicting an unexpected IT event such as the one J. Crew experienced isn't always possible.

For an enterprise with multi-tiered applications with load-balancing on the front-end and a database server and Web servers on the back-end, adding an additional server often requires several changes..."

"In today's business environment, stagnation is a leading cause of death
amongst corporations. It has become commonplace for production facilities
to run around the clock and customer service to be available globally
24/7. The success of an organization depends on implementing the most
efficient and effective processes. As such, operational disruptions
that lead to work and production failures can bring terrible, and often
fatal, consequences. Immediate effects of operational disruptions can
be observed as a halt in production, however, long-term and frequently
dire consequences are felt through contractual penalties when delivery
dates cannot be met. Today, success relies on the continuous performance
of IT systems - if any one system is compromised, stagnation of work and
production followed closely by losses in revenue will almost certainly
ensue..."

"Organizations frequently struggle with project management, and tech initiatives are no exception. Research reveals that 45 percent of large IT projects go over budget, while delivering 56 percent less value than promised. Meanwhile, three-quarters of project participants lack confidence that their efforts will succeed, and nearly four of five say that business is "usually" or "always" out of sync with requirements. This puts tremendous pressure on the CIOs who ultimately take responsibility for these undertakings, so it's essential to avoid the following classic project management mistakes..."

"DevOps in all its forms is really taking off - whatever 'DevOps' actually means. Well, for me, it's continuous, agile, pipelined delivery of automated business services, controlled by end-to-end feedback loops - and 'taking off' means that the big boys are buying up the capabilities needed for 'DevOps at Scale'.

An example is the purchase of UrbanCode by IBM; and (since not everyone engaged in Agile likes big companies) the risk is that we get into religious wars about whether DevOps at Scale is really, properly, Agile - which are just a bit pointless..."

"Power. Cooling. Space. Asset management. Outage. Any business that owns a Data Centre or if DC is their primary business, can easily relate to the importance of any of these mentioned aspects. According to a study conducted by IDC, as much as 84 per cent of DCs have issues related to these. Also, majority of DC outages and downtime have been caused by human errors, which can be directly attributed to the poor operations and maintenance practices..."

It doesn't matter if you're using iOS, Android, Windows Phone or
BlackBerry, these tips apply to every mobile device that connects to
the Internet.

"How susceptible a device is to malware depends on its operating system
and how users interact with their device. There are far less threats
targeting iOS than there are targeting Android, but a few iOS threats do
exist. Scam sites that are designed to steal your personal information,
for example, exist on both platforms. Hacks often occur on the server
side and users who don't have a security application installed on their
device will not be aware that their information could be misused,"
told us Filip Chytry, Mobile Malware Analyst at AVAST.

"All one needs to do is glance at the news once in a while to see that cyber-security issues for both enterprise and consumers are getting worse and more common, despite the best efforts of IT security experts. These stories are in the news virtually every day. The recent Target, eBay, Domino's Pizza and scores of other breaches (such as the Heartbleed bug) bear this out. Naturally, as a result of these security threats, organizations large and small are putting more and more emphasis on protecting their data. But are they protecting against every risk? ..."

"In the not-distant future, home appliances will be hacked, entire homes will be haunted: Front doors remotely unlocked, thermostats on the fridges secretly reset to cause spoilage; lights turned on and off; spam ads sent to your glasses, watches and elliptical machines.

'This is nothing. This is small social stuff. The big stuff is coming,' Andy Thurai, chief architect and group CTO of application security and identity products with Intel Corp..."

"The world's leading insurance market has reported a sharp increase in
companies seeking insurance cover from hackers stealing customer data
and cyber terrorists shutting down websites to demand a ransom.

Geoff White, underwriting manager for cyber, technology and media at
Lloyd's syndicate Barbican, said the market for cyber insurance had
'increased dramatically', with gross written premiums rising sharply
every year since 2009..."

"The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report has brought numerous insights over the last 10 years, and 2014's report was no exception. If you haven't read it yet, you should take the time to read the full report and understand how it applies to your industry and enterprise.

One of the most compelling statistics of the report is right on the front cover: "The universe of threats may seem limitless, but 92% of the 100,000 incidents we've analyzed from the last 10 years can be described by just nine basic patterns." This year's DBIR offers further insights into cybercrime and how enterprises can better protect themselves..,

"In a rather uncommon occurrence, we are updating one of our papers within
a year of publication. As shown by our recent deep dive into Advanced
Endpoint and Server Protection, endpoint security is evolving pretty
quickly. As mentioned in the latest version of our Endpoint Security
Buyer's Guide, mobile devices are just additional endpoints that need
to be managed like any other device. But it has become clear that we
need to dig a bit deeper into securing mobile endpoints, so we will..."

"DoS and DDoS are both denial-of-service attacks. The attacks work by requesting so many resources from a server that the server cannot respond to legitimate requests. A DoS is an attack that originates from a single device. A distributed DoS (or DDoS) involves malicious traffic from multiple devices.

"Security training provider KnowBe4 released the results of its June 2014 survey on ransomware, which found that while more IT pros than ever before are concerned about the risk of being hit with system-locking malware, a vast majority believe security awareness training and data backup are the most effective ways to stave off a serious attack..."

"In a recent research survey, ESG asked security professionals to identify the most important type of data for use in malware detection and analysis (see the full report, Advanced Malware Detection and Protection Trends). The responses were as follows:

"The number of phishing sites in the first quarter of 2014 leaped 10.7 percent over the previous quarter, the Anti-Phishing Working Group reports. 2013 was one of the heaviest years for phishing on record, and Q1 2014 perpetuated that trend posting the second-highest number of phishing attacks ever recorded in a first quarter.

The APWG detected an average of 41,738 new phishing attacks per month in the first quarter. January saw a temporary rash of phishing on virtual servers; these phishing attacks use a technique where a cybercriminal creates and hosts phishing pages on multiple unique domains all hosted on a compromised Web server..."

"You can go on a job interview and bleat out manicured answers like a
little sheepie job-seeker, but I hope you don't. You'll have much more
impact, learn more and have more fun if you treat the job interview like
a sales call for a consulting project.

If you haven't consulted before, you may think that consultants go
in to see prospective clients ready to dive into a presentation about
themselves and their capabilities. Some consultants do that, and those
people seldom get the consulting work. Who wants to hear a consultant
(or anyone) drone on and on about their skills and talents?..."

"The issue of flexible scheduling has received a lot of attention
lately. Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer made quite a media splash when she
decided to do away with remote working scenarios last year. I certainly
understand the need and value of having teams of people "cohabitate"
in an effort to build esprit de corps and to work on developing the
type of corporate culture your team aspires to. However, I feel that
organizations that embrace flexible work arrangements have a number of
tangible advantages.

I'm working with a number of coaching clients who have offices in cities
where they don't have access to the deepest talent pool. One advantage
of flexible work arrangements is that it opens up access to a new group
of potential contributors who may not happen to reside in your company's
main geographic location..."

"When we speak, we have about 60 seconds to capture our audience's attention, establish credibility, orient them to our topic, and motivate them to listen, says Darlene Price, president of Well Said, Inc., and author of 'Well Said! Presentations and Conversations That Get Results.'

If you waste those precious opening seconds with a joke, an agenda, an apology, housekeeping details, a string of thank-yous, or a rambling pointless paragraph littered with "ums" and "uhs," your audience's minds are likely to drift, and you may not get them back..."

"Need fashion advice? Some of us obsess about what to wear in even the most mundane circumstances, but we really get worked up when it's a job interview. After all, we want to look competent, professional, and -- it's ok to admit it -- attractive.

Will the right clothes cause someone to hire you without regard to your professional qualifications? Of course not. But clothes are one way we convey who we are during that all-important first impression. Our day-to-day outfits might be casual, but job interviews encourage us to be a bit more formal. Even if your idea of choosing a "dress for success" outfit is "What's reasonably clean?" we each do give some thought to what to wear..."

"Docker has rapidly become a showstopper in the world of cloud computing. The San Francisco-based open source program recently released Docker 1.0, making it production-ready. With cloud providers such as Google, IBM and Red Hat -- among others -- showing support and using its technology, it's safe to say that Docker is here to stay. Or is it?..."

"There are an almost infinite ways to run data storage backups
incorrectly. But doing it correctly requires following a few tried
and true practices. It's important to adapt t data storage backup best
practices so they can function well in the face of rapid technological
advancement.

"Despite the sometimes exaggerated hype surrounding big data, the
fundamental assertion is true: data - and the decisions driven by data - now
represent the next frontier of innovation and productivity.

Some large companies have used emerging technologies to extract
significant value from big data. Visa recently announced that increasing
the number of attributes it analyzes in each credit card transaction
from 40 to 200 has saved the company 6 cents in every $100 worth of
transactions. Wal-Mart uses a self-teaching semantic search tool that,
honed by the monthly clickstream data of 45 million online shoppers,
tailors offerings to online customers, has raised the rate of completed
transactions by more than 10 percent..."

"The R programming language is used for data visualization and expermiental analysis for the likes of Facebook and has a rapidly growing user base of more than two million. What began in 1995 as an open source academic research tool has evolved for use among commercial and industrial businesses around the world.

Revolution Analytics supports the R community and the ever-growing needs of commercial users. Recently named a top 10 influencer on the topic of Big Data, I asked David Smith, the Chief Community Officer at Revolution Analytics, to share with me what keeps this programming language ticking..."

"There is so much noise in today's e-commerce world. So many different companies are trying to grab a share of the market and reach consumers in new ways. It can be difficult sometimes to cut through the noise and make sense of all that is going on. In order for your company to be successful and have an impactful marketing strategy, making sense of this noise is imperative.

We all know that a successful marketing campaign needs to be strategic, focused and unique, but often times that is much easier said than done, especially in the digital age..."

"'Big Data as a Service...' Sounds like the ultimate buzzword mashup, doesn't it? Yet, there needs to be some ability to bring data resources into the enterprise, package it, and make it presentable and easily accessible to decision makers, without requiring them or IT to spend weeks and months finding, securing and cleaning data sources. Big data should be in the cloud - at least a private cloud.

Varun Sharma, an enterprise solutions architect, proposes a tiered big data reference architecture for capitalizing on the power and potential of data while ensuring security and governance..."

"Demand for big data analytics will only continue to soar as the overall market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 27% through 2017, amounting to a $32.4 billion market, according to industry research. Yet, with all of the investments into analytics tools and talent, CIOs and other IT leaders can lose sight of what they're ultimately seeking to do. Collecting lots of big data, after all, doesn't amount to much if teams don't know how to effectively mine and translate it...."

"In a blow to the prospects of personal hygiene of future generations, 96 percent of millennials ages 18 to 24 see their mobile phones as being very important, compared with only 90 percent who feel the same way about deodorant and 93 percent about their toothbrush, according to Bank of America's study on our attitudes toward smartphones..."

"There is no one definition of Net Neutrality. It is a concept rather than a technical or legal definition. It is not even clear in many eyes whether it applies to all networks (no) or just the Public Internet (yes) - and what happens where they both share infrastructure such as broadband access (err... good question).

Certain things are definitely "not neutral" under any definition, such as deliberate degradation or outright blocking of legal Internet content or applications, on otherwise uncongested networks. Conversely, other aspects such as capped data plans, the use of CDNs or protections against denial-of-service attacks are viewed as completely acceptable, by all but the most hardcore "activists"..."

"Based on all the analyst reports, articles, and conference chatter out there, one can be forgiven for assuming that bring your own device (BYOD) is an unstoppable wave that needs to be accommodated and supported in enterprises.

In fact, a conscientious, business-minded CIO would likely to see BYOD as the ultimate expression of user desires, and work at ways to design systems that are open and accommodating to any and all smartphones or tablets..."

Securing a company's IT environment can be a daunting task, and the growing adoption of bring-your-own-device can only add to the complexity. To effectively manage BYOD, security managers need to define new strategies to manage the resulting risks..."

"SearchCIO has been buzzing about BYOD trends and the increased use of mobile technology for some time now, but how many corporate employees actually use iPads and other tablets for work? According to a report by Forrester Research, tablet devices are primarily in the hands of top-level employees in the workplace -- the very top.

Last year, Forrester surveyed 3,519 people and found that directors and employees were four times more likely to use tablets at work compared to their underlings. The upper echelons were also two times more likely to use a tablet over managers or supervisors.

What's behind the gap? Are workers reserving their tablets for play, not work?..."

"Only four out of 10 IT decision makers report that their company has a formal bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy in place.

Nearly three out of every four organizations issue corporate-owned laptops (74 percent) and smartphones (71 percent) to their workforces, indicating that smartphone use and notebook adoption is widespread in the enterprise, according to a report from research firm Frost & Sullivan.
Tablets, on the other hand, are issued by only half (47 percent) of the surveyed enterprises.These devices, however, are expected to bridge this gap over the next three years, as many of the more data-intensive mobile applications migrate over to the tablets..."

"The OpenSSL Project, gatekeepers for the widely used open source encryption software, has been widely criticized in the wake of the Heartbleed vulnerability, but the organization has responded by establishing a roadmap to address some of its longstanding issues and improve communication with its community.

Posted to the OpenSSL website this week, the roadmap enumerates some of the problems that have accrued within the organization over the years. The most pressing concerns deal with the lack of consistent documentation across the project -- with some bugs being fixed but never recorded in the tracking system -- and with documentation for certain areas of the OpenSSL software either being missing or wrong..."

"First of all, this article has nothing to do with modern hacking
techniques like ASLR bypass, ROP exploits, 0day remote kernel exploits or Chrome's
Chain-14-Different-Bugs-To-Get-There...

Nope, nothing of the above. This article will cover one interesting
old-school Unix hacking technique, that will still work nowadays in 2013.
Hacking technique of which (to my suprise) even many security-related people haven't heard of.

That is probably because nobody ever really talked about it before.
Why I decided to write on this subject is because, to me personally, it's pretty funny
to see what can be done with simple Unix wildcard poisoning tricks.
So, from this article, what you can expect is collection of neat *nix hacking
tricks that as far as I know somehow didn't emerge earlier. .."

Nexenta announced that Hillary Rodham Clinton, Former Secretary of State and Former U.S. Senator from New York, will deliver the keynote address at Nexenta's OpenSDx Summit on Thursday, August 28, 2014 in San Francisco.

Coinciding with the last day of VMworld 2014, Nexenta's OpenSDx Summit is an invitation-only event that convenes more than 400 CEOs, CIOs, investors and VIPs. Nexenta hosts this annual event to discuss the importance and advancement of software-defined technologies, and the impact that they have on organizations around the world as they embrace the Software-Defined Data Center. OpenSDx Summit will include industry expert panels and thought-provoking conversations around Big Data, the Internet of Things, mobility, social media, and other topics.

Nexenta announced that the world renowned, Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL),
an international research facility, has deployed NexentaStor to support
its rapid data growth and to ensure business continuity.

Funded and governed by France, Germany and the UK, in partnership
with 12 countries, ILL is at the forefront of neutron science and
technology. Every year 1500 researchers visit the centre in Grenoble,
France and carry out more than 800 experiments.

With unpredicted increases in scientific research data and the
organizations' own data growth rates rising by 25% every year, ILL's
existing NetApp infrastructure constantly needed more capacity. However,
it was becoming harder to manage the entire upgrade process and the cost
was escalating. ILL decided to split its data in two. The scientific
research data would remain on the incumbent solution and the growing
amount of user data would be moved to a new platform. ILL was also looking
to add high availability capabilities to protect against disasters and
ensure business continuity for its users.

Following a recommendation from Dell, ILL turned to Nexenta for an SDS
solution. Not only did NexentaStor offer high availability, unlimited
snapshots and automatic failover, it was based on the open source file
system ZFS which integrated perfectly with the ILL's existing Solaris
storage platform.

tw telecom announced that TMC, a global, integrated media company,
selected its Alerts Driven Dynamic Capacity capability as a recipient of
the 2014 Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award. The award
honors exceptional products and services that facilitate voice, data
and video communications brought to market in the past 12 months.
The TMC accolade marks the second award in just two weeks for Alerts
Driven Dynamic Capacity. The capability also recently received Light
Reading's 2014 Leading Lights Most Innovative Enterprise Service Award.

Alerts Driven Dynamic Capacity (ADDC) is a real-time, automatic,
dedicated Ethernet bandwidth-on-demand capability that, for the first
time, allows enterprises to pre-set bandwidth utilization thresholds,
that when reached, the Ethernet service will automatically double or
triple capacity without human intervention.